In incentivizing doctors to focus on lucrative specialties, Lombardy had given short shrift to basic preventative care. That limited what constituted the most basic surveillance system in a pandemic—family doctors who interacted with patients. In privatizing a host of services at its hospitals, the region produced a setup in which no one was fully in charge; in which no one was empowered to think systematically about how to respond to an emergency, rationing what protective gear was available. That was an invitation for the coronavirus to spread.
